Taking Addressees Seriously in the Study of Legitimation: Resilient Authoritarianism in Algeria During the Arab Uprisings

This paper presents a holistic and innovative framework for studying legitimation strategies in autocracies. It adopts an empirical-analytical perspective on legitimation as a domestic strategy of political rule, propagating a focus on societal target groups. The framework takes into account multiple dimensions that haven’t been brought together in scholarly research until now: types, modes, and most importantly addressees of legitimation strategies. The typology of legitimation strategies is based on a synthesis of literature from systems theory and authoritarianism studies on the Arab world, leading to a framework on a medium level of abstraction. The focus on societal target groups is a novel contribution to the study of legitimacy and legitimation in autocracies, making it possible to go beyond the study of regime elites’ actions to state-society-relations more broadly. The addressees’ response is crucial for assessing the success or failure of the employed strategies. This framework is designed for small-N qualitative analyses which seek to trace actual mechanisms of regime strategies in autocracies. A case study of Algeria during the Arab uprising demonstrates how the framework can be used to shed light on the dynamics during a crisis of legitimacy. The empirical study is based on original fieldwork conducted in 2013. One main result is that many strategies did not resonate with the opposition, but were instrumentalized to boost regime resilience. The framework helps consider indirect effects of strategies on other addressees. Many measures in Algeria led to the exclusion and defamation of substantial parts of the population. This reveals a dark side of legitimation strategies which has not yet been acknowledged by the literature. The crisis of legitimacy manifest in the uprisings could not be solved, as although various strategies of legitimation were employed, many of them failed. They were thus not the only cause for authoritarian resilience.